There Are No Girls on the Internet - Tech Conference Used AI to Fake Female Speakers to Look Diverse – BEST OF TANGOTI

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00:01:51.760 I love a good tech scam.

00:01:53.960 Not the kind that hurts people,

00:01:55.700 but the kind that reveals just how much smoke and mirrors

00:01:59.000 holds the tech industry together.

00:02:01.700 Case in point, in 2023, a tech conference called Devternity

00:02:06.300 got caught faking female speakers

00:02:09.000 with potentially fake photos and fabricated bios.

00:02:13.540 Now, at the time, it just seemed like a kind of embarrassing anomaly.

00:02:17.940 We covered it on the show, had a very good laugh, and pretty much moved on.

00:02:21.900 But today, in 2026, with fake AI-generated personas flooding the internet and being used for everything from marketing to election interference,

00:02:32.740 it looks less like a one-off scandal and more like a warning we should have heeded.

00:02:37.740 So today, let's revisit the story of DevTernity

00:02:40.880 and why fake personas are the tech problem that nobody's taking seriously enough. 0.84

00:02:47.280 I'm not saying this woman doesn't exist.

00:02:50.220 I'm just saying she reads like a woman written by a man.

00:02:59.900 There Are No Girls on the Internet is a production of iHeartRadio and Unbossed Creative. 0.68

00:03:08.120 I'm Bridget Todd, and this is There Are No Girls on the Internet.

00:03:13.780 So I feel like Christmas has kind of come a little bit early for me because, Mike, as you know, not only am I deeply fascinated by identity and technology, but also I am deeply fascinated by my other true love, which is scams.

00:03:28.820 You know this about me. I love a good scam. I love scam content, scam podcasts. Give me all the scams.

00:03:34.000 I mean, don't scam me, but I want to be not involved in the scam and then hear about how the scam unfolded so I can be like, oh, that's how they did it.

00:03:42.600 Yeah, your love of scams and catfishing is legendary, no doubt.

00:03:48.220 So catfishing is a scam that I am specifically interested in.

00:03:52.580 And this wild story that was blowing up on Twitter last week involves all three, identity and technology, scams, and catfishing.

00:03:59.180 And as fascinating as I find all of these, I also think it's really a story that tells us a lot about how people actually think about marginalized folks in technology. Like, do they actually see us? When they see us, do they respect us? When they actually do include us, is that inclusion a gimmick? Is it done to take the heat off criticism? Like, why is it done?

00:04:21.720 And when they try to include us and get it so, so, so wrong, what does that tell us too?

00:04:28.420 So let's talk about DevTernity.

00:04:30.860 So DevTernity is a tech conference for developers that attendees have to pay from as little as $435 up to $870 to attend.

00:04:40.400 It was founded by Edward Sizoff in 2015.

00:04:43.400 So this conference had been called out for not having a very diverse lineup of speakers, like most of their speakers tended to be white men.

00:04:50.460 And to deal with that, Edwards, the organizer, allegedly decided to flesh out their lineup by tapping into the existing pool of really talented, marginalized people who have been building and shaking things up in tech for a very long time.

00:05:06.840 Oh, wait, no, no, no, that's not what he did.

00:05:08.280 That would be a normal thing to do. 0.95

00:05:09.760 What he actually did was flesh out that lineup by creating AI-generated women speakers to add to the lineup. 0.99

00:05:17.160 And as if that's not bad enough, like that's already pretty bad, it doesn't stop there. 0.62

00:05:22.980 Because in addition to creating those phony women to speak at his conference, it was also

00:05:28.520 revealed that Edwards had been running this entire like fake female tech influencer catfish

00:05:35.260 enterprise and had been doing so for years.

00:05:39.220 Unsurprisingly, the entire thing was full of drama.

00:05:41.440 And honestly, like I don't think I have ever seen anything unfold quite like this in the

00:05:46.460 space before.

00:05:47.000 so let's get into it. So this all started when engineer Gurgly Orzos was looking into the lineup

00:05:52.740 at DevTruity after a couple of his colleagues were asked to speak there. He started looking

00:05:57.720 into the lineup and became a little bit suspicious of two of the women speakers listed. So these two

00:06:03.080 women speakers had been listed as coming from a pretty prominent tech company, Coinbase, which is

00:06:07.880 like a cryptocurrency exchange platform. Anna Boyko, who was on the speaker's page listed as a staff

00:06:13.060 engineer at Coinbase. And Natalie slash Natalia, sometimes it's Natalie, sometimes it's Natalia,

00:06:18.760 Stadler, who was listed as a software craftswoman at Coinbase. So one of these women who was listed

00:06:24.380 as working at Coinbase said that she was also affiliated with Ethereum, a type of cryptocurrency.

00:06:29.920 And Gerkley was like, it's a little bit odd that somebody would be speaking at a conference

00:06:34.040 representing both Coinbase, a cryptocurrency platform, and also a type of cryptocurrency.

00:06:40.660 He was like, that didn't seem right to me.

00:06:42.440 So he got suspicious and looked into it.

00:06:44.440 And that's when he found that these women did not seem to exist.

00:06:48.220 They don't have any kind of social presence beyond what appears on the conference website. 0.89

00:06:52.840 Gurgley tweeted, imagine a tech conference having no call for proposals as they reach

00:06:57.820 out to speakers directly.

00:06:59.200 They successfully attract some of the most heavy hitter male speakers in tech and three

00:07:04.140 women speakers. 1.00

00:07:05.280 Now imagine my surprise that two of those women are fake profiles. 1.00

00:07:10.100 They do not exist. 1.00

00:07:12.120 Nada.

00:07:12.900 So I gotta really give it to Gurgley here.

00:07:15.220 He must have sniffed out that something was fishy

00:07:17.220 and then like just held it,

00:07:19.280 like nursed it like a grudge

00:07:20.760 and held onto it like a dog with a bone

00:07:22.940 because dude did his homework.

00:07:25.460 He found web archives that go back to 2021 0.97

00:07:27.840 that list these two non-existent women

00:07:30.640 as speakers at Depternity. 1.00

00:07:32.660 One of them also spoke

00:07:34.100 or at least was listed as a speaker

00:07:35.720 back in 2022 as well.

00:07:38.060 In the aftermath of all this,

00:07:39.700 Gurgley really did some deep digging.

00:07:41.960 He found a tweet from 2021 publicly calling out the conference for having a mostly male

00:07:47.340 lineup.

00:07:48.360 On August 3rd, 2021, Maddie Stratton, a director of developer relations, tweeted,

00:07:53.620 good thing I'm not tweeting about tech this week or else I might have to call out DevTernity 0.98

00:07:57.640 for pretty much having all white dudes as speakers. 0.99

00:08:00.800 Given who they listed at the top, it doesn't surprise me at all.

00:08:03.960 So then Julia Kershina, also known as Coding Unicorn, who calls herself one of the conference co-founders, replies.

00:08:11.520 Remember Julia's name because she is going to become important later.

00:08:15.220 Julia replies to Maddie's tweet saying,

00:08:17.500 Hi Matt, Julia from the DevTrinity team here.

00:08:20.120 Thanks for raising this.

00:08:21.200 Out of the 14 invited female speakers, three confirmed, two canceled as we had to postpone to survive COVID.

00:08:27.760 There was a lot to improve so you can advise on how to make the lineup better.

00:08:31.040 Let's chat. I'll send you a DM.

00:08:33.120 So this very same day that Maddie calls out DevTernity for having an all-male lineup,

00:08:38.260 August 3rd, 2021, is when DevTernity also coincidentally adds their very first fake

00:08:44.900 woman speaker. 1.00

00:08:46.320 Like I said, Gurgly brought receipts.

00:08:48.920 The DevTernity conference website has a public GitHub repo.

00:08:52.340 GitHub is a place online where developers can show other folks what they're working on,

00:08:55.920 where you could see the full edit history of the conference website.

00:08:58.920 So he included a screenshot showing the specific changes to the website, and the date of those changes confirms that Natalia Slatter, software craftswoman at Coinbase, was added a few hours after Maddie's complaint of the lack of diversity of the conference.

00:09:13.820 Two hours, to be exact.

00:09:15.500 In that edit, Julia, the conference co-founder, was also added to the speaker's lineup.

00:09:20.500 So, I don't know.

00:09:21.840 That seems pretty suspicious.

00:09:25.400 Like, that timing, I don't know.

00:09:26.880 Well, if you're going to make up fake people, why have all the changes to your website be

00:09:34.260 publicly on GitHub? 1.00

00:09:35.940 Gergly also found that another one of the fake women added to the lineup's headshot

00:09:40.160 was taken from This Person Does Not Exist, which is a site that randomly generates pictures

00:09:45.840 of non-existent people generated by AI, which is pretty funny that the place where he got

00:09:52.820 these pictures really spells out what's going on.

00:09:55.320 This person does not exist.

00:09:57.280 Overall, Gurgley found four non-existent people who are all women listed as speakers on this

00:10:04.040 conference website since they were called out for their lack of women speakers back in 2021.

00:10:08.480 Gurgley writes on his website, I decided to share that this conference advertises fake speakers

00:10:12.720 and has done so for years. This statement is easily verifiable by anybody in the same way

00:10:17.580 that I did. I have not seen this type of deceit at any other conference, and I've seen enough

00:10:21.940 that I didn't want to keep quiet.

00:10:23.580 And honestly, like I got a major shout outs to Gurgley here.

00:10:27.120 We will throw the piece on his website

00:10:29.520 with all of his receipts in the show notes

00:10:31.120 for folks to check out.

00:10:31.920 You definitely should.

00:10:33.120 But one of the questions that Gurgley does ask

00:10:36.220 is that he got suspicious when he saw this lineup

00:10:40.040 and that he doesn't believe

00:10:41.720 that he's the only person who got suspicious.

00:10:44.380 Like he doesn't think he was the only person

00:10:45.980 to be like looking at these people up. 0.99

00:10:48.260 These women were listed as working 1.00

00:10:49.620 for very prominent tech companies.

00:10:51.420 And so certainly somebody has like looked them up on LinkedIn or whatever, for whatever reason is like, I'm the only person who decided to speak up about it, who didn't want to keep quiet. And even that to me is really interesting. Like, I don't know what's really going on there.

00:11:05.900 But it almost makes me wonder if the vast majority of people at this conference didn't think the women speakers were worth really paying attention to.

00:11:18.200 So let alone like investigating, throwing them into a quick Google search, whatever.

00:11:23.100 Maybe they were just like prominent male name in tech, prominent male name in tech, prominent male name in tech. 0.59

00:11:28.700 Some useless chick, some useless chick, prominent male name in tech, prominent male name in tech. 0.84

00:11:33.320 Like, maybe it didn't even register to them to be paying attention to the women speakers, what organizations they represented and what they were talking about. 0.98

00:11:40.900 Maybe it didn't even register to be looking at them all that closely because, like, maybe they just, like, didn't value them in the same way.

00:11:46.400 I don't know. That's just my theory because I do agree with Gurgley here that certainly he cannot be the first person to have uncovered this.

00:11:53.140 And it did not take a very substantial amount of digging to find out that these people weren't necessarily real.

00:11:59.900 So, like, what's going on?

00:12:01.060 I don't know. I feel like we encounter weird stuff online all the time. And it's so easy to just chalk it up to like, maybe it's a scam or maybe the internet is broken or maybe I don't understand.

00:12:13.600 Yeah. I mean, I would like to think that if I encountered this, I would have said something.

00:12:19.960 Would you have, would you have dug like gurgly?

00:12:23.320 I would have dug for sure.

00:12:24.820 If I had sniffed out, like, I have a lot of time on my hands and I love to do a deep dive.

00:12:30.520 So if I had, like, sniffed out that something funky was going on, I probably would have looked into it.

00:12:35.680 I think I'm the kind of person who might have, like, thought that I was misunderstanding something or that I was getting something wrong or misreading something.

00:12:43.200 I respect that Gurgley is the kind of person who was like, I'm taking this to social media right away because something is not right.

00:12:48.900 Yeah, I appreciate that, too. Kudos to Gurgley.

00:12:53.560 Let's take a quick break.

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00:15:00.740 When I was 14 years old, I was kidnapped and held captive for nine months. I survived,

00:15:07.520 and I've spent my life exploring how other people survive what should have destroyed them.

00:15:13.080 I'm Elizabeth Smart, and these are The Survivor Files.

00:15:16.680 I just remember this low, taunting voice next to my ear saying, 0.96

00:15:22.120 shut up, don't say anything.

00:15:24.880 Every week, I'm with survivors who live through the unthinkable. 0.98

00:15:29.300 I knew if he woke up, without a doubt, he was going to hurt me.

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00:15:40.820 They are abducted, stalked, controlled, and nearly silenced.

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00:15:48.720 They're stories about what it takes to make it out alive.

00:15:52.360 Listen to The Survivor Files with Elizabeth Smart on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

00:16:05.840 At our back.

00:16:06.820 so gargley is pretty suspicious about some of these women speakers on the lineup

00:16:12.320 he does some digging and decides to post about this on linkedin and twitter where the devternity

00:16:18.280 conference founder edward sizoff first tweets in response so his response is probably one of the

00:16:25.020 most dramatic but also nonsensical explanations i have ever read in my life it is super long like

00:16:31.480 it's still up on twitter if folks want to we'll link to the whole thing but like i'm not going

00:16:34.960 to read the whole thing here, but I will get into a couple of key bits. So first of all, Edward says

00:16:40.360 that, oh no, it is not him who has done something wrong. He heavily implies that Gurgley must be

00:16:46.640 the bad guy. Why? Because Gurgley took to social media to talk about this in the first place,

00:16:52.320 rather than, I guess, like contacting him directly, privately, which means that Gurgley

00:16:57.760 just wants attention. He just wants clout. He's jealous. He's trying to take me down.

00:17:03.100 Edwards writes,

00:17:04.080 I won't be responding directly to Mr. Orzal's accusation

00:17:07.760 and won't even link to it here,

00:17:09.660 given that he didn't even bother contacting me

00:17:11.980 and sharing his concerns.

00:17:13.720 He went straight to socials

00:17:15.520 and using the power of his social network,

00:17:18.320 shared all his assumptions without validating them,

00:17:21.020 damaging my life's work and reputation.

00:17:23.600 I don't know what his intention was,

00:17:25.640 but harm has been done.

00:17:27.580 Nothing good, only harm.

00:17:29.460 so yeah it's it's gurgly who is the bad guy because gurgly decided to like ask what's happening

00:17:36.980 to use his platform on social media to ask some really good questions that need answers that alone

00:17:43.660 is evidence of gurgly being the bad guy and and try being out to get edwards edwards also uses

00:17:51.200 some pretty choice language defending himself he writes alexa blame to you what happened and then

00:17:56.940 you decide if my life's work and the upcoming event deserve to be ruined and I ought to be 0.60

00:18:01.300 lynched. The use of the word lynched there is a choice. It will not be the last time he uses that

00:18:06.580 word to reference what's going on in the situation. So then he kind of gets into his explanation of

00:18:11.700 what's going on, which is that basically it was a mistake, a mistake that he realized happened,

00:18:17.900 but then just like didn't have time to fix. He says, so he claims that Natalie's name and profile

00:18:22.940 was auto-generated with a random title,

00:18:26.160 random Twitter handle, and random picture.

00:18:28.280 And that he realized that this was happening

00:18:30.540 and it was a mistake, that he intended to fix it,

00:18:33.280 but then he realized that it wasn't going to be a quick fix

00:18:35.300 and that, quote, it's better to have that demo persona

00:18:38.980 while I'm searching for replacement speakers.

00:18:41.540 And first of all, like, I am no developer,

00:18:44.120 so, like, maybe it's not a quick fix.

00:18:46.160 Maybe it takes days to fix this.

00:18:48.600 I cannot speak for whether or not that is true. 0.97

00:18:50.440 It does sound like bullshit to me, but I don't know. 0.67

00:18:53.380 But I have to say, even if that is true, like even if what he said, we take him at his word, 0.94

00:18:58.740 it is still in my book pretty deceitful because you're asking people to pay $800 when you

00:19:05.460 know the lineup that you are advertising publicly could not possibly come to fruition.

00:19:11.240 Like what if I'm really interested in whatever this fake person, Natalie, has to say and

00:19:17.660 her line of work and her expertise, and I spend money, I plunked down $800 to see her speak because 0.88

00:19:24.580 I'm interested in her and you advertised her as a speaker. That would be deceitful. And it's 1.00

00:19:29.280 interesting to me how he, in his explanation, glosses over that so quickly. Yeah, the deceitfulness

00:19:36.280 here is definitely the worst part. So he does say that the conference ended up having a less

00:19:42.800 diverse than predicted lineup because these women who had agreed to speak all dropped out for

00:19:47.820 reasons that he could not control. He writes, Sandy, for health issues, Julia switched to 0.68

00:19:53.140 helping the organization. You can't do both speaking and organization. Sandy and Julia

00:19:57.940 didn't make it to the final schedule, but they kept appearing on the website while I was looking

00:20:02.040 for a replacement. This partially led to an accusation that since they're not part of the

00:20:07.100 schedule, we've probably added them just to meet arbitrary diversity criterias. This statement is

00:20:12.600 bold and unfair. Sandy and Julia confirmed their participation. They should have been part of the

00:20:17.720 final schedule, but dropped out for reasons out of our control at the worst possible time.

00:20:22.360 Ask Sandy or Julia. So we ended up with only one female speaker, Chris. So while I was looking for

00:20:28.940 a last-minute replacement, hoping I'd find it, Sandy and Julia were still mentioned on the website.

00:20:33.880 Right. So I have to say, some of these people did end up being real. Christine Howard, who is the

00:20:40.440 head of developer relations at Amazon Web Services, confirmed to 404 Media that she had agreed to

00:20:46.040 speak and that she does exist. Sandy Metz is a real person who 404 Media confirmed did agree to

00:20:52.800 speak and had to drop out because she was getting knee surgery. The conference founder keeps

00:20:56.680 repeating this very weird point in his defense that none of the fake women ever actually made

00:21:02.480 onto the final lineup and i don't totally know what he means there but i think that what he is

00:21:07.600 saying is that even though these women weren't actually speaking and they were listed as speakers

00:21:14.700 that they didn't actually show up to speak and so like nobody was duped but like of course they

00:21:20.340 didn't show up to speak they're not real people it sounds like he's saying that julia had to drop

00:21:26.820 out because she was going to be on the organizing committee and i've never heard of that being a

00:21:32.880 rule that like if you're on the organizing committee you can't speak at the conference

00:21:38.080 like that's just not a thing that i've ever heard so that doesn't make sense and then he also says

00:21:44.600 that she had to drop out due to circumstances beyond their control but that circumstance was

00:21:50.720 that she wanted to be an organizer rather than a speaker so like that also doesn't make sense

00:21:56.560 no none of it makes sense his entire explanation is nonsensical to me so after this whole thing

00:22:02.760 went viral on twitter edwards did remove the fake women from the website so i guess apparently it

00:22:08.620 ended up being a quicker fix than he had previously indicated like the reason why he said that he

00:22:13.120 couldn't he was aware of this mistake on the website but couldn't fix it is because it was

00:22:16.940 not a quick fix but apparently quick enough that it could be taken care of within a day of this

00:22:21.820 going viral on twitter right and the fix was changing some copy on the website which historically

00:22:27.560 in most systems is a pretty quick fix it would take weeks so lastly from edwards's long twitter

00:22:39.080 explanation you know who is really at fault here can you guess society society according to edwards

00:22:47.340 specifically, cancel culture. He tweeted, I said it was a mistake, a bug that turned out to be a

00:22:54.200 feature. I even fixed that on my website. We're cool, right? No, we want blood. Let's cancel this

00:23:00.500 sinner, all caps. The amount of hate and lynching I keep receiving is as if I would have scammed or

00:23:06.360 killed someone, but I won't defend myself because I don't feel guilty. I did nothing terrible that

00:23:11.620 I need to apologize for.

00:23:13.400 Side note, I'm not sure that Edward knows what lynching is.

00:23:16.600 Like, I would like to sit him down and ask him what he thinks it entails.

00:23:20.540 So not only is this, in my opinion, like deeply unethical behavior from the perspective of

00:23:26.200 people being asked to pay up to $800 to attend this conference with a fake lineup, it also 0.91

00:23:33.620 really sucks for the other speakers.

00:23:36.620 Scott Hanselman, who is a very well-respected person in the space who cares a lot about 0.69

00:23:41.040 things like inclusion and diversity in tech was slated to speak, but pulled out after all this

00:23:46.080 happened. He tweeted, this whole conference debacle is so disappointing. Speakers like myself,

00:23:52.560 when invited to a conference, will immediately say, who all is going to be there? I've my rules

00:23:57.720 for participation posted on my site, including an inclusive lineup for years. I was duped by

00:24:03.380 fake speakers also. And so it's pretty bad when people who have made it their thing to use their,

00:24:11.840 like Scott Hanselman is a white man. The fact that he is someone who is like intentionally

00:24:17.280 using his privilege and his reputation and his background to try to help inclusion in the space

00:24:25.340 and like do what he can to like make it more inclusive by saying, yeah, if you want me to

00:24:29.180 speak at your event, it has to be inclusive. Giving that incentive for organizers to make

00:24:33.020 their space is inclusive, it doesn't work if these organizers just lie and just make up who is going

00:24:39.280 to be on the lineup. David Heinemir Hansen, the creator of Ruby on Rails, was also slated to speak

00:24:45.260 and pulled out. And he said that he asked for his name to be removed from the lineup website,

00:24:49.320 a request that was not honored. Oof. I mean, I have to say, if I had all of these big name,

00:24:58.440 high profile people in the tech space dragging me like this i would just be more this is like

00:25:06.580 like i had nothing to do with this and i'm embarrassed for edwards you know like this

00:25:10.220 would be mortifying to me from what i've seen poking around it like the devternity website and

00:25:15.760 uh julia's coding unicorn instagram account it seems like they're edwards is really into

00:25:23.040 devternity i mean obviously it's his whole it seems to be his whole professional gig but it's

00:25:29.620 just like the aesthetic trappings of coding so far as i can tell like maybe there's more to it

00:25:36.660 but like the sense that one gets from looking at the social accounts uh is not that there's like

00:25:43.320 deep important wisdom uh and new stuff being revealed at this conference but it's really just

00:25:51.820 aesthetics and social aspects of being a coder or developer and so the loss of these high profile

00:26:02.860 people that uh that's got to like really sting right because it seems like the whole thing is

00:26:08.220 built on uh big names and credibility and uh star fucking so i want to get into that more in just a

00:26:16.340 bit because i have picked up on what you're saying too and i think i think it goes quite a bit deeper 0.64

00:26:20.600 than that but specifically about the devternity conference in preparing for this episode i too

00:26:26.400 like poked around their website and their social and the video like their sizzle reel that they

00:26:31.540 have for the event it basically is like devternity this is a conference people attend there are

00:26:38.820 lanyards like it's like what they're telling me is like this is definitely a tech conference that

00:26:44.260 people go to like they're not telling me what i will learn what the space feels like like why i

00:26:51.220 want to show up there it's like they're more interested in the flash and surface appearance

00:26:57.160 of a slick tech conference but it feels completely surface level yeah and maybe we can talk about the

00:27:04.800 name devternity what does that mean one might say it doesn't mean anything

00:27:09.980 one might even go further and say maybe it's a little bit fake yeah uh but it is a real name

00:27:19.840 it seems to be a blend of the words dev as in developer and eternity as in the time period

00:27:28.000 that 13 year olds will pledge their undying love uh i guess it's putting those things together

00:27:35.300 with a fake Instagram account of a fake woman.

00:27:39.200 Well, you don't have to worry about that for too much longer

00:27:40.920 because DevTurnity is canceled.

00:27:45.000 Several speakers started dropping out after this happened

00:27:47.980 and the event was meant to be in just a few days,

00:27:50.120 so it's not happening.

00:27:51.780 So even if it was just that, right?

00:27:53.860 Like this would already be one of the weirdest stories

00:27:56.460 I have ever heard happening at a tech conference.

00:27:58.880 But as you hinted, it does not stop there

00:28:01.420 because remember Julia Christina,

00:28:04.440 aka Coding Unicorn, the conference co-founder?

00:28:07.740 So Julia was slated to be a speaker at DevTernity

00:28:10.620 in 2021, 2022, and 2023.

00:28:14.400 She was the person who was supposed to speak,

00:28:17.320 but then moved up to be an organizer, 0.98

00:28:18.680 so she couldn't speak.

00:28:19.980 I mean, you think that maybe that's BS, but whatever.

00:28:22.440 She is also a pretty established tech influencer.

00:28:25.760 Her Instagram account, called Coding Unicorn,

00:28:28.500 goes back to 2018.

00:28:29.620 She has 120,000 followers on her account, where her bio reads, the best coding account

00:28:35.980 on Instagram.

00:28:37.160 Hi, my name is Julia.

00:28:38.720 I am a professional software developer posting no BS coding career and productivity tips

00:28:43.440 and a DevTernity fan. 0.95

00:28:45.740 She's done your basic influencer stuff. 0.96

00:28:49.120 She does giveaways, raffles on her platform, all that stuff.

00:28:53.700 Her pictures show her presumably working on code and really looking hot, like showing a lot of cleavage and just generally kind of like being a tech hottie while really hyping up DevTernity events and conferences.

00:29:11.160 But, and here is the big reveal, she's not even real, it doesn't look like.

00:29:16.620 404 Media looked into it.

00:29:18.100 They found IP logs that seem to indicate Edwards inviting and then logging into an account belonging to Coding Unicorn, which is Julia's social media handle.

00:29:29.800 So basically just like logging in as her.

00:29:33.500 A YouTube video posted last year by Edwards that had five views when 404 Media accessed it showed him logged into his own email accounts as well as one for Coding Unicorn.

00:29:44.440 Many of Coding Unicorn's posts are just copied and pasted from Edwards' LinkedIn or Instagram

00:29:50.320 without any attribution. Edwards also pretty explicitly admits that he is the one responsible

00:29:56.660 for the Coding Unicorn account on his LinkedIn profile, saying,

00:30:01.060 I devote most of my time to growing the most popular coding account on Instagram with 120k

00:30:05.840 followers, Coding Unicorn, without elaborating on exactly what that entails. So this is pretty

00:30:12.120 confusing. I think it's time we heard from Julia herself. Hi, everybody. It's Coding Unicorn here.

00:30:19.760 Do you want to become an awesome software developer, build a successful career,

00:30:25.700 become more productive and happy? I'm here to help. In 2020, the tech company Hashnode published

00:30:32.900 an interview with Julia on their Women in Tech blog, all about the issues that Julia faces being

00:30:38.040 a woman working in a male-dominated space. Now, the person that wrote that article has

00:30:42.960 confirmed with 404 Media that the interview was conducted via email and they never actually spoke.

00:30:48.920 Honestly, the interview kind of reads like bad hacker girl fan fiction. Here's a little taste

00:30:54.960 of it. Julia, how'd you get into tech? Nine years ago, my parents forced me to go to college and

00:31:00.820 get a computer science degree. They wanted me to find a nice, quiet office job because I was a

00:31:05.940 problem kid, a school rebel. I didn't fulfill my parents' dreams. I am still a rebel, but one with

00:31:12.640 a computer science degree. So tell me that does not sound like a fantasy version of a woman working 0.98

00:31:21.500 in tech. Like I'm a rebel. The reason why I became a programmer is because my parents were looking

00:31:28.560 for me to settle down and find a nice quiet job to stay out of trouble. Yeah, it sounds like

00:31:35.260 something from the 90s movie hackers which by the way i was looking at a picture of the fashions

00:31:41.160 from that movie matthew lillard in the movie hackers like the way that they had imagined

00:31:46.320 how computer hackers dress in that movie is is really something i guess i'll just leave it at

00:31:51.560 that so in this interview when julia is asked about gender bias in tech well surprise julia

00:31:58.140 actually thinks that it's men who suffer the most when it comes to gender bias in tech she says i

00:32:03.800 I don't like seeing women as victims because such a mindset turns men into suspects.

00:32:08.760 Men suffer from biases equal to women.

00:32:11.300 Think of job interviews. 0.54

00:32:13.020 We give too much attention to gender bias and depreciate other cognition biases, such as doubt avoidance,

00:32:18.940 where we make an ill decision just to avoid uncertainty or reject a person that doesn't look nice enough.

00:32:24.180 Julia's advice for women to deal with gender bias? 0.98

00:32:27.040 Stop blaming others for being biased and prove yourself.

00:32:30.000 So yeah, it reads to me like this fantasy, fictionalized version of a woman in tech who doesn't think that there's any kind of gender bias and is not even interested in talking about it. Certainly would not say that she has faced it herself. And is only interested in improving herself. Like, that just reads like a woman invented by a man.

00:32:53.720 More after a quick break. 0.70

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00:34:06.500 This is Prose Society,

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00:35:00.640 When I was 14 years old, I was kidnapped and held captive for nine months.

00:35:06.560 I survived, and I've spent my life exploring how other people survive what should have destroyed them.

00:35:12.940 I'm Elizabeth Smart, and these are the Survivor Files.

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00:35:51.800 Listen to The Survivor Files with Elizabeth Smart on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

00:36:05.920 Let's get right back into it.

00:36:08.440 So the evidence that links Edwards to being Julia, like catfishing as Julia, or at least that indicates that she's not a real human, is pretty overwhelming.

00:36:19.300 Some of the images that she has posted on Instagram that show computer monitors

00:36:23.240 have her logged in under Edwards' name.

00:36:27.480 On Lobster's, a coding social media forum,

00:36:30.480 Edwards' and Julia's accounts were banned multiple times for sock puppeting in 2019 and 2020.

00:36:35.880 The person who runs Lobster said,

00:36:37.480 I remember being creeped out by the effort involved and choice to use Instagram glamour shots.

00:36:42.740 It was just the one profile when I saw him,

00:36:45.000 And I'm kind of stunned that he's not just continued, but multiplied his efforts.

00:36:49.320 Again, many of Julia's Instagram posts were copied word for word from Edwards' own social

00:36:54.020 media accounts.

00:36:55.020 And The Verge looked into the university where Julia claims to have attended for her bachelor's

00:36:59.740 degree in information technology on her LinkedIn.

00:37:03.100 And the university said that they do not indicate any records of a student with her name.

00:37:07.240 I'm also like 99% sure that it is not even the same woman in every picture.

00:37:12.920 It's like just a hot woman with dark hair and ample cleavage in every picture.

00:37:18.480 But I genuinely, like I went back to the very first post back in 2018, and I genuinely think they are different people.

00:37:25.340 The woman who is used back in 2018 when the account first starts looks very different from the woman that is used today.

00:37:33.200 They both have brown hair and ample bosom, but that is pretty much where the similarities end.

00:37:38.080 We'll put a link to a couple of pictures of Julia from her Instagram in the show notes.

00:37:42.100 And honestly, you can be the judge. Let me know if you think this is legit. These are all the same women. Or if you think something is going on. And this is kind of complicated. Like, I want to make sure that I am speaking about this carefully. But we need to talk about the way that Julia presents physically on Instagram.

00:38:01.300 Like, it's clear that he is going for a specific kind of look with the way that Julia looks on social media.

00:38:08.420 Like, she's very conventionally attractive.

00:38:11.160 In all of her pictures, she is posed to look like, I saw somebody describe it as almost like a booth babe kind of way, where the cleavage is very prominent.

00:38:19.540 The poses are all kind of like, like, I wouldn't call them sexualized, but they're definitely meant to highlight her physicality and her looks and her figure.

00:38:29.880 And it's this very specific kind of almost like an uncanny valley kind of hot where she is in these very clearly posed, staged pictures that look kind of fake that could not possibly be depicting a real scenario where she's like really working.

00:38:49.560 like this is this might sound minor but and one of the things about her is that she talks quite a bit

00:38:54.900 about how being a developer means that she can travel the world doesn't have a boss she can work

00:38:58.960 from whatever exotic locale that she wants so in one picture she's meant to be working from like

00:39:03.860 someplace like an exotic beach of some kind and she's holding one of those big giant coconuts

00:39:11.280 where they just chop the top off and put a straw in it and then you're drinking it not the small

00:39:16.100 ones, the big ones. So if you've ever had one of those, you know that they're like, they're

00:39:21.020 coconuts. And so the bottom is rounded. It's not flat. You couldn't put it on a table like you

00:39:27.200 would a normal beverage container that has a flat bottom. It's rounded. It's a coconut. So she's

00:39:31.700 holding it in one hand and working on her laptop with another. In what world would somebody whose

00:39:37.000 computer is the main thing they work on be holding a tippy beverage that you cannot sit down while

00:39:44.600 also working one-handed on their laptop. I don't buy it. Never happening.

00:39:50.140 Best case scenario, it's a risky move.

00:39:52.680 Yeah, it's risky. So I feel like Julia almost exists as this kind of fantasy woman that a man

00:40:00.060 would cook up, right? Heaving cleavage. Beautiful, but also a really skilled programmer. She's not 1.00

00:40:06.700 a feminist. She doesn't think that women have any societal disadvantages because of their gender. 1.00

00:40:11.120 She has a dirty mouth and makes like pithy zingers about how people need to worry less 1.00

00:40:15.820 about convention and worry more about leveling up their tech skills. 0.98

00:40:19.460 She describes herself as a free thinker.

00:40:21.740 In one post, she talks about her favorite podcasts.

00:40:24.780 Can you guess who she lists as one of her favorite podcasts?

00:40:29.000 Is it us?

00:40:31.880 Can we make a list?

00:40:33.020 We made the cut.

00:40:34.660 You know, we got a tech podcast here.

00:40:37.700 No, it's Joe Rogan, of course.

00:40:40.680 Famous tech podcaster, Joe Rogan.

00:40:44.040 She also likes Tim Ferriss.

00:40:46.640 Also noted developer.

00:40:48.880 And she does this thing where she photoshops herself into pictures with famous tech leaders.

00:40:53.980 Like, she has a picture of herself photoshopped with Elon Musk.

00:40:56.780 Another picture of herself photoshopped with Jeff Bezos.

00:41:00.560 We actually found the source picture and it's like she just photoshopped herself over his ex-wife.

00:41:06.240 Yeah, and it was, like, an iconic photo that was the go-to photo for Jeff Bezos before they got divorced. Like, anyone who's seen a photo of Jeff Bezos in the 2010s, like, that was it.

00:41:20.560 Yeah, you really called it. You were like, I've seen this picture before, and you found it on reverse Google image search very quickly.

00:41:27.080 Side note, if anybody ever watches the MTV show Catfish,

00:41:30.780 you know that that's like when somebody who thinks they're being catfished

00:41:34.400 calls Nev Schulman, pretty much the only thing he can do is like,

00:41:38.220 let's reverse Google image search these pictures.

00:41:41.440 It's like the one tool in his toolbox that he has.

00:41:45.540 So if they're ever looking for a replacement host for that show,

00:41:48.240 they could call us because we know how to do it too. 0.88

00:41:51.080 So I think that Julia is like this caricature of a certain type 0.57

00:41:55.700 of man's dream woman or like the kind of thing that a male programmer might cook up in his head

00:42:02.520 in his fantasy as a woman in tech you know if you've ever seen the movie gone girl it's like 1.00

00:42:07.880 the cool girl persona but for tech right like she's cool she doesn't she's not a feminist she

00:42:13.700 has a foul mouth loves joe rogan thinks your sexist jokes are really cute loves elon musk like

00:42:18.820 i'm not saying this woman doesn't exist i'm just saying she reads like a woman written by a man 0.99

00:42:25.540 in his head. And it really reminds me of something that an influencer with a very large male following

00:42:31.020 once told me. She told me that if your audience is men, like if you're trying to curate men as

00:42:37.280 your audience, and it's men who are consuming your content on Instagram, those men are imagining

00:42:43.540 themselves with you. So you can't have like other men in your images. You can't have anything that

00:42:49.860 would ruin the illusion that they could be with you. You can't have that in your images.

00:42:55.080 So I think whoever is running Julia's account, I think it's probably Edwards, is doing so in this way that very much lets techie guys imagine that they could be traveling the world with this like beautiful, foul-mouthed, nerdy woman who only wants to talk about leveling up her tech skills while wearing like a bikini, right?

00:43:15.060 This Julia account is for men. I think that when I first saw it, I thought like, oh, this is an account that's trying to boost representation for women in tech. Looking at it again, it's like, no, no, this is an account for men. This is an account that is trying to be a place where male programmers gather.

00:43:33.320 like, come for the cheesecake cleavage shots, stay for my pithy musings on programming and 1.00

00:43:41.260 culture. One commenter on Julia's Instagram put it really well. They said,

00:43:46.680 I thought this group was about programming, but it appears to be a group of horny dudes

00:43:50.720 drooling over a girl that always pose right next to a laptop, which I thought was really funny.

00:43:56.800 So apparently me and that commenter are not the only ones who are suspicious.

00:44:00.740 In a 2020 comment that Julia left on Hacker News, she actually spoke to the idea of people

00:44:06.840 not thinking that she is real. 1.00

00:44:09.520 But peep how she twists this around about making it a response to a dig about how women 1.00

00:44:14.060 can't be programmers, not whether or not she exists at all.

00:44:18.560 In her comment on Hacker News, she writes,

00:44:20.580 As a female developer with 60K followers on Instagram, I went through all of this.

00:44:25.020 Programmers don't look like that.

00:44:26.520 You're fake, some dude writes on your content.

00:44:28.720 Are you a model or a coder? 0.99

00:44:30.240 bullies are not the happiest people on the planet.

00:44:33.080 Some of them have been harassed

00:44:34.280 or bullied by their parents in schools, et cetera.

00:44:36.520 I discovered the hard way when I pay back with the hate,

00:44:39.600 it makes me feel bad and also feeds their hate.

00:44:42.360 The hardest and probably wisest solution

00:44:44.320 is to respond with love to those unhappy folks

00:44:46.520 or not responding at all.

00:44:48.140 It's very hard, but it works.

00:44:49.560 Now, keep in mind, Julia wrote this in a comment

00:44:53.100 on another post on Hacker News.

00:44:55.440 So that means that Edwards is likely

00:44:56.980 like not just posting on Instagram as Julia, but also doing interviews and in comments across the

00:45:05.340 internet as Julia as well. Whoa, this goes deep. So I've gone through both Julia's account and

00:45:12.060 Edward's account from the very beginning, did a lot of scrolling. And here's my theory about what

00:45:17.340 I think is going on. This is not, this is just my opinion. I think that Edwards at some point

00:45:23.180 decided that he wanted to be like an online tech influencer and market himself on social media as

00:45:30.160 somebody who should be listened to when it comes to those kind of conversations. That kind of goes

00:45:34.060 back to what you were saying, Mike, about how DevTernity, it seems like a kind of shallow

00:45:39.220 representation of a tech conference, right? I think that Edwards courted for himself that tech

00:45:46.340 persona guy. Like I see it a lot on Twitter since Elon Musk took over. Somebody who was always

00:45:51.000 trying to like maximize their games and like gamify success and always giving you like eight

00:45:57.060 rules for productivity, eight hacks for this. Like things that aren't even necessarily about

00:46:01.880 tech always. I think like a general influencer on tech, but also life. Like that's what I think

00:46:09.300 that he wanted to be. Or he thought like, I need to do this. It'll be successful for me if I do

00:46:14.300 this. You know, not just about tech, but about what books to read, how to think about culture.

00:46:18.300 So in 2016, Edwards' Instagram is pretty normal, right? It's pictures of his family, pretty normal pictures of himself, pictures of himself with a lightsaber from Star Wars or with Game of Thrones characters. But around 2018, his pictures sort of change. They become a lot more polished and a lot more influencer-y, for lack of a better word.

00:46:41.180 he really is like marketing himself as a tech luminary he's taking pictures of the books that

00:46:47.140 he's reading he's you know in captions giving life advice about tech and life and leveling up

00:46:54.260 and i think that he must have done this for a little bit of time and maybe not seen success

00:46:59.620 or growth and then sometime in 2018 he creates julia's page now the first few pictures on julia's

00:47:06.880 Instagram account, interestingly, don't show Julia's face, right? They're just like disembodied

00:47:12.000 body parts. Like in one, it's a closeup of her cleavage holding a book about programming called 0.71

00:47:17.740 Elegant Objects up against her chest. In another, it's just her feet while she's like got a laptop

00:47:22.880 on her lap. In some, in many of them, she's using her hands to obscure her face or like

00:47:28.660 has her face down. Honestly, I think that COVID was probably like beneficial to these people

00:47:35.260 Well, because in a lot of the images post-COVID, you see Julia wearing a face mask.

00:47:40.340 And so I think they were like, oh, great.

00:47:41.500 We've got a reason to not show her face.

00:47:43.880 And so, you know, at first I was thinking about how deeply insulting this entire thing

00:47:49.740 is to women in tech.

00:47:51.860 You know, this idea that says that being a woman in tech means like wearing a bikini

00:47:56.420 that says GitHub on it and showing off your body while there's like a laptop vaguely in

00:48:01.240 the background or whatever.

00:48:02.140 But I also want to say that, like, not only is it incredibly insulting to women, it is also incredibly insulting to men, I think. 0.99

00:48:09.760 Like, I think that Edwards thinks that men are so horny and stupid that they won't even notice that it is not the same woman in every picture. 0.99

00:48:18.580 Like, they are so stupid and horny that if you create a fictional version of their own fantasy that is just projecting their desires back at them, they will be invested and also believe that person actually exists. 0.99

00:48:32.100 So that's a lot of effort. 1.00

00:48:34.100 What do you think is getting out of all of this?

00:48:37.800 Well, first of all, I think this is partially just a good old-fashioned financial scam. 0.70

00:48:42.380 Julia is meant to hype up his own conferences and tech entities, right?

00:48:46.280 Like she has DevTernity in her bio next to a little heart.

00:48:49.920 She often wears like DevTernity shirts and talks about how much she loves the conferences. 0.85

00:48:54.360 People have to pay as much as $800 to go to these events that Julia hypes up to her

00:48:59.400 150,000 Instagram or 120,000 Instagram followers. Edwards also sells masterclasses. And so I think

00:49:07.160 that Julia in some ways is just like having your own built-in sexy tech influencer to hype up 1.00

00:49:14.160 whatever the thing is that you're selling. And it's just like a straightforward financial grift. 0.99

00:49:18.620 But I also think it doesn't stop there because that wouldn't explain the effort that it takes

00:49:24.480 to like comment as Julia on Hacker News, right?

00:49:28.380 To comment in articles as Julia, right?

00:49:31.200 Because that's a different thing.

00:49:33.140 So I also think that there might be like a kind of clout

00:49:36.980 that comes with being Julia,

00:49:39.040 this attractive woman in technology.

00:49:41.860 You know, I almost would feel differently

00:49:43.840 if Edwards was, you know,

00:49:45.780 if when he was asked to do an interview

00:49:49.320 for a blog about women in tech,

00:49:51.960 if he was like, oh, this is just a persona, like, I don't want to take up room, I don't want to take

00:49:56.540 away a slot from another, an actual human woman in tech. But he did those interviews specifically

00:50:01.620 about being a woman in tech. And he did them as Julia. He could have, it would be pretty weird,

00:50:07.380 but he could have been like, oh, well, this is what I've learned as a man running an account

00:50:12.380 as a woman persona in tech. Like, there are all kinds of things he could have done that I feel

00:50:16.800 like I would be looking at it a little bit less side-eye-y, but he didn't do any of those things.

00:50:21.300 And so I think there must be like an element to this that must be fun. Like it's probably fun to see your following and reach grow. Like I think that if he was unable to be a tech influencer when he's just like some guy, when he's a sexy woman, certainly it's easier to grow an audience of programmer men when you're a sexy woman.

00:50:46.880 And I think it probably is fun and intoxicating to see your following and reach grow.

00:50:52.300 So I think that Julia allowed for Edwards to be the tech influencer that he never got

00:50:56.420 to be as himself, that he never would be as himself because his musings aren't really

00:51:02.020 that novel.

00:51:02.880 They're not really that good, right?

00:51:04.760 Saying if you're listing a list of podcasts for folks to check out and top three is Joe

00:51:10.180 Rogan, the most popular podcaster in the world, I'm sorry, that's not really novel advice.

00:51:15.640 If the books that you're suggesting people read

00:51:17.420 are books like Atomic Habits,

00:51:19.460 I'm sorry, that book is in every airport in the country.

00:51:22.580 These are not novel takes.

00:51:23.980 This is not novel advice.

00:51:25.200 I think that he's somebody who wanted the shine

00:51:28.260 of being a tech luminary,

00:51:30.760 somebody who could give sage wisdom

00:51:32.820 that people, when he spoke, people would listen,

00:51:35.340 but I don't think he had that in him.

00:51:37.320 And so I think that doing it as Julia

00:51:39.440 was the only way that he could do it

00:51:41.740 and actually make an impact,

00:51:43.260 which is actually kind of sad when you think about it.

00:51:45.240 that way it makes a lot of sense when you say it like that and the thing that i just have to keep

00:51:50.160 wondering is what was the bigger thing for him what was the bigger piece of the motivation

00:51:57.420 was it the financial grift and cosplaying julia was just the way to get the following

00:52:05.920 that would allow him to sell tickets to like make the financial grift work or was the bigger

00:52:11.600 motivation being part of that cool kids club of tech guys who talk about their agile practices

00:52:20.680 and post changes to their website to github for some ridiculous reason if i i mean i don't we'll

00:52:30.900 have to ask edwards i would happily interview him if he wants to do the interview as julia

00:52:37.380 We'll figure that out.

00:52:39.200 But no, I think it's got to be the latter.

00:52:43.660 I think that like, especially in tech, I think that's a currency.

00:52:48.480 I think getting to feel like you're somebody who people listen to, it feels good.

00:52:53.120 And I think that it's a space where, I mean, I think it's a space where people are like, when you're a guy, a lot of guys who are like pretty mediocre rise to that.

00:53:06.360 get to have those kinds of platforms and I think that he probably just saw some of those guys and

00:53:10.380 was like why not me and so I think I think it's got to be I think the grift was probably a part

00:53:14.960 of it but I think if in my opinion not the only part and I think that you know as weird of a story

00:53:23.420 as this is I do think it all goes back to this persistent myth that there are no women in tech

00:53:30.440 It's the myth that I started this podcast to bust, you know, like Edwards was quoted as saying that the real problem is that there are not enough women out there that he could book to speak and that tech conferences are all chasing this very small group of women.

00:53:47.420 And that's the problem.

00:53:48.680 He said, there have been thousands of events 0.60

00:53:50.900 chasing the same small subgroup of women speakers.

00:53:54.040 And that to me, like that reveals to me

00:53:57.040 a really just messed up way of understanding

00:54:02.160 and thinking about marginalized people in technology.

00:54:04.820 If you truly believe that how it works

00:54:08.080 is there's a small handful of people

00:54:09.800 that go to every conference,

00:54:11.720 that speak at every, they're on every stage

00:54:13.620 and that every conference is just like,

00:54:17.420 booking those same people, that to me signals that like, first of all, you don't really

00:54:23.080 know the space because that's just, it makes me laugh. But second of all, you don't really care.

00:54:29.100 You don't really care about uplifting marginalized voices. You maybe have gleaned that in 2023,

00:54:36.360 you can't have a lineup of all white men at a tech conference without somebody saying something 0.55

00:54:40.640 about it. And so you know that you need to not have people saying something about it, 0.88

00:54:44.640 but you don't really care beyond that.

00:54:46.560 And I think it also shows to me

00:54:49.040 that he didn't think it was worth it

00:54:50.440 to do the real work.

00:54:51.460 Like somehow this elaborate catfish AI generated scam

00:54:57.080 to him was less work

00:54:59.820 than just like widening your network

00:55:03.640 of marginalized people.

00:55:05.580 And honestly, it's like other conferences

00:55:08.300 managed to do that work

00:55:11.220 of lifting up actual marginalized humans

00:55:13.360 who exist in the space

00:55:14.580 without inventing fake people, right?

00:55:16.700 Valerie Phoenix, the founder of Tech by Choice,

00:55:18.900 which is a group that highlights

00:55:19.820 underestimated people in tech,

00:55:21.260 really put it well on Twitter.

00:55:22.720 Valerie says,

00:55:23.800 the last few days have felt like a slap in the face

00:55:25.920 to many of us whose experiences

00:55:27.780 are seen as cosplay for engagement.

00:55:30.760 I've dedicated countless hours

00:55:32.320 to running Tech by Choice,

00:55:33.680 a nonprofit focused on helping underrepresented groups

00:55:36.220 thrive in tech through education,

00:55:38.100 resources, and mentorship.

00:55:39.320 It's never been about engagement, status, or power.

00:55:41.780 It's about making a difference.

00:55:42.900 every grifter and catfish story we push engagement towards overshadows marginalized individuals real

00:55:49.300 struggles and victories in tech and i guess that's really how i feel like there are so many women and

00:55:56.820 trans folks and non-binary folks and queer folks and black folks and people of color in the space

00:56:02.400 that the and these kind of stunts just like further complicate that experience for us even more

00:56:10.000 This might be a bit of a tangent, but I did want to talk about it because I remember we

00:56:14.320 talked about the Grace Hopper conference and how cis men showed up and overran this conference

00:56:20.640 that was specifically supposed to be a place for women in tech. 0.97

00:56:23.760 And one of the things that we did not talk about in that episode that is absolutely true

00:56:28.100 that actually a listener correctly called me out on not raising in that episode is that

00:56:33.160 a climate where men are taking opportunities like this away from marginalized people really also

00:56:40.140 hurts gender nonconforming folks, trans folks, people who are butch or masked. So it creates 0.63

00:56:46.140 this climate where people feel like they need to be suspicious of these folks when these are the

00:56:51.040 same people who should be feeling comfortable and included in these spaces, right? It creates

00:56:55.820 the conditions where folks feel like even more surveilled and watched and sidelined and pushed

00:57:00.980 out of these spaces where they really ought to be included. And so stunts like this one

00:57:05.140 just make it harder for actual marginalized people, humans who exist in tech. We already

00:57:11.860 have to prove we belong, prove we aren't fake, prove we are real, prove we're in tech, prove

00:57:16.660 we know what we're doing, and now prove that we exist, that we're actually humans. I've actually

00:57:21.720 already seen men on Twitter saying that this whole catfish thing just proves what happens when

00:57:27.520 people focus too much on diversity. So this whole debacle of a man doing something bad

00:57:32.700 is already being used to further marginalize and punish people who are already marginalized in

00:57:39.020 tech. It never ends. And I think it really is important that inclusion is not something that

00:57:45.860 you do for points or clout or to get followers to your fake account or to grift or to avoid

00:57:51.400 getting called out. It really matters. We've talked about this across several episodes.

00:57:56.480 it matters that our spaces where technology is being built include as many voices as they can

00:58:03.460 it matters for all of us and so i think that people like edwards just don't get it right they

00:58:08.740 just see it as this cosmetic thing that you can use to boost your own credibility and that it

00:58:14.280 really hurts it hurts it hurts that this is how they see us it really does it also seems like it

00:58:19.800 it's not clear what edwards is actually building so the idea that like you'll build it better if

00:58:26.220 you have more diverse viewpoints in the room like you'll end up with a better product i'm not sure

00:58:33.020 he would get that because it's not clear like what he has built other than like a scammy conference

00:58:39.640 yes and i think again it goes back to your point of using the veneer of like tech bro just to build

00:58:49.840 your personal brand, not to build anything real, anything that matters. And yeah, I just I don't

00:58:56.060 like it. I don't think I don't think it serves us when that is seen as a currency. I don't think it

00:58:59.920 serves us. So I wanted to end a little bit of a where are they now? So Edwards has been pretty

00:59:06.620 quiet on Twitter after this whole thing unfolded. His last tweets are still his tweets about being

00:59:13.540 canceled and, you know, his weird explanations from November 25th. The DevTurity Conference

00:59:19.920 is canceled. As for Julia, well, on November 17th, she hinted that maybe she's reexamining

00:59:26.640 her priorities and might be spending less time on Instagram. On her last post on November 17th,

00:59:32.520 saying, I started posting less on Instagram since my life priorities have changed significantly.

00:59:37.560 Or maybe I'm just getting older. So maybe we'll be hearing a little bit less from Julia on

00:59:42.980 Instagram.

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There Are No Girls on the Internet - January 30, 2026

Tech Conference Used AI to Fake Female Speakers to Look Diverse – BEST OF TANGOTI

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